Looking at Classical history, it was easy to see how tyrants and dictators got shit done. There was one vision (their own, no matter how weird or corrupt) and that vision continued uninterrupted and unchallenged for years. Think about the change of governments in whatever pseudo-democracy we now live in: with politicians being voted in and out, there’s a huge amount of short-term focus. Budgets are raised by one lot and slashed by another. Looking back, there’s very little coherent vision on that sort of politics.

What Lucan Drakenfeld is about? Well, both him – and the series – are experiments to see if good characters can be interesting and complex too, whilst exploring the fringes of genres: fantasy, crime and history. Retribution goes a little deeper into this, but with a much darker storyline – as I mentioned earlier it features a serial killer and attempts to look at some moral grey areas.